Cutting The Episode Count

There always will be a place for a show that follows a procedural model and can sustain stories for decades on end without worry of running out of criminals to catch, patients to heal, or a family crisis to handle before dinnertime. What follows here isn’t a rallying cry to abandon those types of shows. Nor does this stem from a desire to stop any attempt to unleash a complex, multifaceted story that necessitates years in the telling of it.

However, I would say that those are almost the only two models currently in play, and that’s hurting the medium as a whole.